A Memorable Morning at Concord High School, 30 Years After the Challenger

CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE—By 11:45 a.m. Thursday, things were pretty much back to normal at Concord High School. A hulking six-footer lumbered down the hall, humming aimlessly into an empty cranberry juice bottle he'd wedged halfway into his mouth. Another kid sat on the floor, slumped over a clipboard while a teacher lectured with practiced encouragement, "You know, if you showed up more of the time, your grades would actually be pretty good." Outside the library, with its framed photo of a young Barack Obama autographing a banner reading "Concord High School: A Required Stop on the Road to the White House?" two girls in near-identical hoodies stopped to read something posted on the wall and then dissolved in a simultaneous fit of giggles.

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It was not that way 30 years ago, when Concord High School students gathered in the auditorium to watch Christa Corrigan McAuliffe become the first teacher—the first private citizen, really—in space. McAuliffe was their teacher, and from the balcony hung a banner urging the neophyte astronaut to "Have A Blast"—the same message emblazoned on a banner that they'd sent with her months earlier when she'd set off for astronaut training in Houston. Noisemakers at hand, they were oblivions to what McAuliffe's mother, Grace George Corrigan, would later remember as "icicles hanging from the shuttle."

At 11:38 a.m. that morning, it appeared that, after five delays, the space shuttle Challenger would finally deliver on its long awaited promise. But a mere 73 seconds later, as Challenger achieved full engine power for the thrust that would carry it into orbit, the spacecraft exploded into a fireball.

The Challenger explosion is one of those things—like the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center—that many people believe they saw live. In fact, few of them did. When the Challenger disaster occurred, cable news was in its infancy, and CNN was the only network, broadcast or cable, to carry it live. However, among those who did see it in real time were thousands of schoolchildren. NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the full mission for many schools, and many others—like the Concord schools—received special feeds from their local cable companies. Among those watching in one of Concord's elementary schools was a sixth grader who now teaches social studies at Concord High School. Kim Bleier-Woods headed the committee that planned the school's commemoration of the 30th anniversary—a deliberately low-key affair, she says. Retired teachers and former students had a panel discussion, and the entire student body watched a documentary on McAuliffe's life. To accommodate schedules, a moment of silence was held earlier in the morning, while at 11:38, a flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol, the Kennedy and Huston space centers, and McAuliffe's Massachusetts high school was brought to half-mast and then raised again.

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It's often assumed Christa McAuliffe was a science teacher, and that her "lessons in space" would have involved salamanders or growing weird crystals. In fact, she was a social studies teacher, who designed a course "The American Woman" that is still being taught at Concord High School today. The elective course relies heavily on the journal and diary accounts of 'ordinary' women. "I touch the future. I teach," is famously attributed to McAuliffe, but "History was important," to Christa, says Bleier-Woods. "Just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals," McAuliffe wrote on her teacher-in-space application, "I as a space traveler would do the same."

Memory plays all kinds of tricks, creating false timelines and obscuring facts. Less than two months before the Challenger exploded—and long before Sandy Hook or even Columbine—a kid brought his father's shotgun to Concord High. A recent dropout, a polite loner with "chubby cheeks" who was teased for his looks and his clothing, Louis Cartier took two students hostage before police mortally wounded him.

It was in McAuliffe's memory, not Cartier's, that the Concord High teachers had students fill out colored paper sheets Thursday morning, sheets that asked if they could do anything, what would they reach for. But it was perhaps in the spirit of Cartier—and of his anguished guidance counselor Edward Zehnder, who told reporters days after the incident: "It is really hard to figure out…I am honestly pounding my head. I talked to him quite a lot. He came in two weeks ago. All [that] I was asking myself why. I don't think anyone knows the reasons"—that the teachers pasted the slips in all the school corridors. I want to be a famous skateboarder….live in Hawaii and be a presidant[stet]…get a job….anesthesiologist…be a millionaire….fix the government….drop my mix tape.

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The teacher-in-space idea was born in the Reagan White House, although it's not clear how much of an interest the old man took in it at first. He certainly ceded the honors in 1985 to Vice President George H. W. Bush in announcing the selection of McAuliffe from among ten thousand applicants (among those charged with narrowing the pool of applicants were Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the artificial heart, and Robin Williams' girlfriend on Mork and Mindy, Pam Dawber). And then the vice president promised "my dear friend and the President's, Bill Bennett, the Secretary of Education" as the first substitute teacher to fill in for McAuliffe. However, Reagan was almost certainly taking an interest as launch day—and the State of the Union—drew near.

The shuttle was originally scheduled for lift-off on January 22, but then the delays—impressive even by NASA standards—set in. First there was a routine scheduling delay, and then there was a dust storm at one of the emergency landing sites. Bad weather at the launch site then caused a delay, and when that was resolved there was a technical problem with a door latch mechanism. Pressure was on—but from where? And on whom?

Writing in 1993, Grace George Corrigan said her daughter had told the family the day before the disaster that NASA had decided to press ahead with the launch "no matter what." Booster rocket engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried desperately to get the launch postponed, arguing that the elastic seals at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets tended to stiffen and unseal in cold weather. At first, Thiokol managers agreed with them, formally recommending a launch delay. Under pressure from NASA, the managers ultimately reversed their opinion. But who was putting the pressure on NASA?

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In March of 1986, White House officials disclosed that NASA recommended in early January that President Reagan take note of the teacher's voyage in his State of the Union Message, but claimed the recommendation was not passed on to any of the president's speechwriters. It seems unlikely that the event would have escaped their attention, though. And it would have left a remarked-on hole in a celebratory State of the Union if the president could not salute the first teacher in space because she was still stuck firmly on the ground.

In the end though, Ronald Reagan got his moment. The State of the Union address was canceled—for the first and only time in history—and Peggy Noonan was called in for an emergency re-write. The old B list actor gave an A list performance: "The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"

The words were from John Magee's WWII-era poem "High Flight," an unlikely choice for Reagan's night table reading. Years later, Noonan would explain on C-SPAN how the words found their way to Reagan. "It just came to me. I just remembered it from seventh grade."